The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: June 2006, Volume 5, Issue 6
Effective B2B Search Engine Marketing: Closing the Loop is Key
by Ken Yamada, Marketing Strategist, iProspect
B2B Sales Team: Imagine a day when there is no time to make a cold call because your calendar is full of appointments from inbound leads.
Marketing Team: Imagine a day without a complaint from the sales team.
Welcome to the day when your company is doing search engine marketing right!
Okay, the reality of it certainly isn’t that simple. Effective search engine marketing is not the silver bullet to solving your inter-departmental politics, just as there is no silver bullet to achieving a position one ranking in Google. However, a comprehensive search engine marketing strategy, leveraging solid data analytics, and closing the loop between marketing and sales can be worth its terabytes in gold to a B2B organization.
If you’re reading this and wondering, “Are other B2B companies feeling the same pain as me?” The answer is probably “Yes.” A recent survey conducted by Forrester Research of over 150 B2B senior-level executives revealed that 3 out of 5 specifically identified the following issues as challenges they face:
Reaching decision makers
Generating more leads
Improving the quality of leads
Your Prospects are Searching
According to a study by Forbes.com and Gartner Group that involved 13,000 decision-making executives, 1 out of 3 go to the Web first to find information about products or services. A full 80% of them use search engines on a daily basis. And 1 out of 2 of them click on an ad. So it’s clear that search engines are inexorably intertwined in the qualification process of decision-makers seeking solutions that you and your competitors offer .
Analyze the Data
If those research results don’t convince you, try looking at your own data. How many closed business transactions were influenced by your presence on search engines in the last month? According to Forrester, if your answer is anything but “I don’t know,” you are in the minority. And if you don’t know this, how do you know it’s worth having a website at all? It’s time to look at your Web analytics data – or at least your log-file data – as well as the sign-ups you get for your free newsletter, or for further information, and begin matching this up with your offline sales data.
Solutions
An effective search engine marketing campaign should generate high visibility on the keywords that are being frequently searched by your target audience. To effectively generate B2B leads, optimize your website copy and paid search ad copy with persuasive elements and calls to action to entice click-throughs from your prospects to information that they view as valuable.
Integrate incoming website lead data with data in the CRM or sales force automation tool solution that your sales team uses. Depending on your volume of leads and sales this may be a simple manual process, or a fairly complex automated one, but once accomplished it will provide you with a valuable asset – enabling you to tie website leads to their follow-up, and eventual successful close, by your sales team. This will then enable you to track which sales are influenced by which keyword and which search engine, and adjust your search marketing campaign accordingly.
The key to a B2B search engine marketing campaign that’s viewed by both the sales and the marketing teams as successful is closing the loop, so work to integrate your search data with whatever your sales team is using to track sales. This will clarify what’s working, what isn’t, and will help bridge the credibility gap that exists between sales and marketing at so many organizations.
